Most of us never decide to quit following Jesus. That is the strange thing about half-hearted discipleship. It rarely announces itself with a slammed door or a renounced faith. It shows up instead as a slight shift, a small reservation kept in the back pocket, a willingness to keep walking the road as long as the road stays reasonable. We don’t turn around, but we leave just enough room to turn around in case the cost climbs higher than we budgeted for.

Luke hands us one sentence that exposes exactly that reservation in us, and he does it by showing us a man who had no reservations.

“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51)

A single verse, and the whole Gospel of Luke turns on its hinge here. Everything Luke has been carefully building toward, every title he has stacked on Jesus, now bends toward one city and one outcome. To understand why that sentence should unsettle us, it helps to feel the full weight of what Jesus was walking into, and why he could not have done anything else.

Why Jerusalem Was the Only Direction

Luke spends nine chapters introducing Jesus slowly, layer over layer. Gabriel announces him as the promised Davidic King and Son of God. Zechariah calls him the horn of salvation. Simeon, holding an infant, calls him the salvation of God. He grows into the one who preaches good news to the poor, who silences storms and demons with a word, who showed compassion on a widow at Nain, who commends a Roman soldier’s faith above all Israel’s, who tells a trembling, bleeding woman that her faith has saved her. At Caesarea Philippi, Peter gathered every thread of evidence into one confession where he proclaimed that Jesus is the Christ of God.

Immediately, the tone of the Gospel changes. The Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and on the third day rise (Luke 9:22). On the mountain of transfiguration, Moses and Elijah appear and speak with him about his departure, the thing he would accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). Every glorious title Luke has hung on Jesus turns out to demand that Jesus be hung on the cross.

This is the freight behind verse 51. The Davidic King has to claim David’s city, and he has to claim it by suffering rather than by the sword. The Redeemer has to pay the actual price. The bringer of good news has to go and secure the news he brings. The one who gathered outcasts in has to become the outcast outside the gate so that the gathered could be brought permanently near. The merciful one has to make mercy lawful by satisfying justice. Jesus goes to Jerusalem because of who he is. A Messiah this weighted down with titles could never have settled into a long, comfortable ministry of Galilean miracles. The titles were too heavy and the Father’s plan too clear, so he set his face, and he pressed on toward the cross.

The phrase Luke chooses is a Hebrew one with a deep root. Isaiah used it of God’s chosen Servant:

“But the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame” (Isaiah 50:7)

A flint face is a resolved face. The Servant in Isaiah knows his beard will be plucked, his back struck, his face spat upon, and he sets himself toward the Father’s will anyway in full confidence that he will be vindicated. Ezekiel hears the same phrase as a charge to carry the hard truth into Jerusalem. When Luke writes that Jesus “set his face,” he is reaching back to both of those Old Testament passages. Jesus walked toward Jerusalem with total certainty that the Father would carry him through the suffering and raise him out the other side. His resolve had everything to do with confidence in the Father and almost nothing to do with the road being smooth because the road was anything but.

That is the model the rest of the passage holds up against us. Three men meet Jesus on that road, and each one shows us a different way the flint of our face cracks.

When We Want to Hold the Matches

Before the three men, there is a detour through a Samaritan village, and it exposes something in the disciples that dwells in us, too.

Jesus sent messengers ahead into Samaria to prepare the way, and the village refused to receive him precisely because his face was set toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:52–53). He had taken the Samaritan road on purpose. The safe, conventional Jewish route bypassed Samaria entirely, and Jesus chose the harder path because his heart ran toward the very people most likely to reject him. They rejected him anyway, before he even arrived.

James and John had a solution ready:

“Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54)

This is not a random outburst. They had just watched Elijah appear in glory on the mountain, and the story of Elijah calling down fire was fresh in the air. It is worth recalling that story, because it explains both the appeal and the error of what the brothers proposed. King Ahaziah of Samaria, having badly injured himself, sent men all the way to a pagan city to consult an idol about whether he would recover. Elijah intercepted them with a blunt message: the true God is the living God of Israel. Don’t inquire of an idol. Tell the king that he will not get up from that bed. Ahaziah, a careful student of his mother Jezebel’s playbook for handling prophets, sent a captain and fifty soldiers to arrest him. Elijah said that if he was truly a man of God, fire would fall, and it did. Fifty-one men became an ash heap. The king, a slow learner, sent another fifty with their captain. Same demand, same result—another smoldering heap.

The point of that account in 2 Kings 1 is that Elijah was defending God’s honor, and God was defending a defenseless prophet. James and John think they are standing in the same spot. The Samaritans have dishonored the Christ, and surely those who dishonor God have fire coming.

Before we are too hard on the brothers, it is worth being honest about where this exact impulse lives in us. The expression of their zeal has modernized; the human heart has not. We rarely call down literal fire. We screenshot the post instead. We forward the article to the group chat with the smirking emoji attached. We rehearse the perfect comeback in the shower. We hope the neighbor who mocked our faith gets what we have decided they deserve. We tell ourselves we only want Jesus vindicated, but the tell is that we want to be the ones holding the matches.

Give the brothers their due first. They refused to bow to the idol of niceness, and that instinct was right. When someone blasphemes, your heart should sting. When someone blames Jesus for their wounds, you should wince. When a fellow believer treats Jesus as an optional accessory clipped onto an otherwise self-directed life, something in you should rise up and object. James and John possessed a loyalty that was real and good. However, it was pointed in the wrong direction, and we know that for certain, because Jesus turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:55).

Did that village deserve judgment? Most definitely, so why was judgment withheld? Because the calendar mattered. Jesus’ day was the day of salvation, not the day of judgment. The proof arrives a few books later in Acts 8, when Samaria receives the gospel with joy. The fire James and John wanted would have incinerated the very people Christ was on his way to die for. Jesus simply moved on to another village (Luke 9:56), and that sentence carries a lesson. When the gospel meets a closed door, remember what was actually rejected. It was the gospel, not you. Refusing to take it personally is what keeps you from the very correction the sons of thunder earned, even when you think your heart is in the right place.

It is worth holding a real face here. Picture the person who has rejected Jesus, or rejected you for following him. When that happened, did you grieve it as a rejection of Christ, or absorb it as a wound to yourself, and would you even be able to tell the difference under pressure? The honest answer to that question often reveals whose honor we were actually defending.

Three Travelers and Three Cracks in Our Resolve

The road continues, and three would-be followers step into it. Each one wants Jesus on terms he will not grant, and together they map the most common ways our own resolve fails.

The first man is all enthusiasm. “I will follow you wherever you go,” Jesus answers him with the foxes and the birds: the animals have dens and nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:57–58). The man’s word was wherever, and Jesus gently shows him that wherever contains a great many uncomfortable places. If the Master himself has no guaranteed comfort in this mission, the servant should not assume he will be comfortable. For most of us, this discomfort will not arrive as poverty or prison. It tends to show up as the neighbor who has filed you under the category of “one of those people.”  It arrives as a hobby or side income that suddenly has to come second. The discomfort is real, even when it is ordinary, but naming which ordinary comfort you may need to give up to follow Jesus is more useful than imagining a persecution you may never face.

The third man Jesus meets on the road also volunteers, but he comes with one small condition. “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus answers, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:61–62). The image points straight back to Elisha, who was plowing when Elijah’s call came. Elisha was allowed to go say goodbye, but then he slaughtered his oxen and burned his equipment, making any return to the old life physically impossible. He had a new calling, and he removed the path back to the old one. The third traveler wants the goodbye without the burned plow. The point underneath is that Jesus is greater than Elijah, so the call he issues asks even more. A heart that keeps glancing backward at what it left behind will be slowly pulled out of the furrow it was told to plow. Longing for the old field eventually walks you back into it.

Notice, though, what Luke withholds. He never tells us what any of the three men decided. That silence is deliberate, and it is aimed at us. If we knew their answers, we would spend our energy judging or excusing them. But because the page goes quiet, the only response left to evaluate is our own.

What Setting Your Face Looks Like

This passage refuses to stay theoretical, because half-hearted discipleship is not a theory. It is a set of very deliberate life choices.

It looks like noticing the places you treated obedience as something you could pause. The sidestepped conversation. The sin you negotiated a smaller version of. The prompting of the Spirit you talked yourself out of. Resolve is not mainly a feeling but a refusal to keep a turnaround lane open. That refusal to turn from Jesus gets made in small, nameable moments rather than in dramatic ones.

It looks like catching yourself reaching for the matches and setting them down. The next time you feel the pull to make sure someone gets the public humiliation you have decided they deserve, you can recognize the impulse as the sons of thunder dressed in modern clothes, and you can let the holy zeal be real while refusing to be the one who calls the fire down. The honor of Christ is safe in better hands than yours, and your assignment on the way to that vindication is to keep walking toward the next “village” where Jesus might be accepted rather than torching the one that rejected him.

It looks like asking about one good thing in your life to see if it has slowly become a reason to delay. It may not be a sin in and of itself. Ask it of a genuine good, a relationship, responsibility, or comfort that has started teaching you to answer Jesus with “after this season.” The cross-shaped question is always the same one Jesus put to the second traveler. Is this attachment producing obedience or postponing it?

It looks like keeping your eyes off the field behind you. The plow does not cut a straight line when the one holding it keeps turning his head. Whatever you have left to follow Christ, the steady forward look is what keeps the furrow straight, and the glance backward is how the old life slowly reclaims you.

Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem to accomplish a salvation you could never have secured for yourself, and he did it with a resolve fueled entirely by confidence in his Father. He has every right to ask the people he saved to follow him with a resolve of the same kind. He is not asking us to manufacture flint by force of will. He is asking us to trust the same Father he trusted, to stop keeping the turnaround lane open, and to take the next concrete step toward him without negotiating the terms, postponing the call, or looking back at what we are leaving behind. The road to Jerusalem was the road to a cross, and then it was the road through an empty tomb. That is the road we are on, and the only honest question left, the one Luke arranged the whole chapter to put in front of us, is whether we are walking it with our faces set.

2026.05.13 / To Jerusalem / Pastor Daniel Steeves